Rome 1960

by David Maraniss

  The Olympic spirit was also under assault in the boxing world that Friday. Loud protests night after night from a few countries—especially Great Britain, which thought it had unfairly lost several bouts—finally prompted the International Amateur Boxing Association to announce the sacking of fifteen Olympic judges for incompetence. The Brits had threatened to pull their boxers unless action was taken. In a peculiarly Italian compromise, the fired officials were allowed to stay on the scene, to avoid embarrassment, but would not work. The ring controversy was of great interest to A. J. Liebling, a boxing expert whose New Yorker essays on the sport had been collected in his legendary 1956 book, The Sweet Science. From Liebling’s perspective, while the Brits and Americans had complaints, the real victims were boxers from Asia and Africa. “Olympic referees form a solid European Bund, accustomed to officiating in each other’s countries and to doing favors for each other’s nationals in trouble,” he wrote from Rome. “They are solemn, histrionic gentlemen who constantly interfere with the boxers, and the new ‘wild men’ (from third world), having no referees of their own in the combine, constantly get the worst of it. These unfortunates are in the position of politicians who want patronage but have no votes to trade.”

  Collusion among Olympic boxing officials was nothing new. None other than Avery Brundage himself, when he headed the American Olympic Committee in 1936, sent a post-Olympic report to the IOC in Lausanne lambasting the officiating in Berlin. Even Brundage’s antipathy toward American factions that had urged the U.S. to boycott the Olympics in Nazi Germany that year, and even his belief that America could learn a thing or two from Hitler, in this instance could not repress a complaint about inequities in the boxing ring. “No set of officials could have been as ignorant of boxing and boxing rules as the decisions indicated. Collusion, therefore, must be the interpretation of such ghastly decisions,” his report asserted. Four days into the boxing competition that year, the Brits and Americans were so upset they threatened to withdraw. But they kept boxing, “and both lived to regret it,” the report stated. “Great Britain and the U.S., the world’s oldest boxing nations, failed to win a single gold medal between them, while Germany had four boxers in the finals, twice as many as any other nation…We doubt any of the four would have reached the semis had the bouts been held in any other country.”

  Once again, the Germans. But in Rome on this Friday, the day after rhythmic shouts of “Hah-ree! Hah-ree! Hah-ree!” echoed throughout the Stadio Olimpico, there was one small gesture of atonement connecting 1936 and 1960. At the request of Gerhard Stoeck, chief of mission of the German team, Hary sought out Jesse Owens and apologized for declining to visit with him before the 100-meter dash. “We thought he should go see Owens,” Stoeck explained. “The incident had given the boy a black eye, so we asked him to make the visit, and he agreed. He is a strange boy sometimes.” Strange he could be, yet Hary was now the rage of Germany after defeating the Americans. “Everybody asks for Hary,” wrote a columnist in Die Welt. “Hary occupies everybody’s mind. Hary dominates every conversation. Hary came out of each telephone receiver. Hary on the subway. Hary in the office. Hary on the screen. Hary in the kitchen. Hary, Hary, above all.”

  Tipped off beforehand, American photographers and writers were waiting at the U.S. sector of the village when Hary approached with a bustling retinue of Germans. Hary and Owens shook hands and exchanged pleasantries with the help of an interpreter. The young champ noticed a pack of cigarettes in the old champ’s shirt pocket. “You smoke? That’s no good. No good!” Hary said. “I’m old now. It’s all right,” Owens responded. He asked the interpreter to tell Hary that he was a great champion with a wonderful start. Then, in street clothes, on a patch of grass outside the men’s dorm, the American and the German dropped into the sprinter’s stance, right knee touching, knuckles down. Ready, set—but no gun, only the click and whir of cameras.

  WILMA RUDOLPH was just waking from her afternoon nap when the American comeback began on the Stadio Olimpico track. It came, appropriately, in a demanding event, the 400-meter hurdles, and leading the way was one of the most respected yet least celebrated athletes on the U.S. squad, Glenn Davis. For journalists and sports fans who took an interest in track and field only once every four years because of the Olympics, Glenn Davis was far down the list of celebrity attractions, but to track nuts like the Nelson brothers of Track & Field News and teammates like Rafer Johnson, he was up near the top. Davis was a winner, he just rarely talked about it. He had won the gold medal in the 400 hurdles at Melbourne. In 1958, when he received the James E. Sullivan Award as the best amateur athlete in the U.S., he had won the NCAA finals and then gone on to defeat the Russians at the tense dual track meet in Moscow. Yet his finest performance, he would insist, came at none of those high-profile venues but at a meet in Stockholm where he had swept four competitions: the 400, the 400 hurdles, the 100, and the 200, running world-class times in all of them.

  It was that versatility, and his relentlessness, that made Davis like a brother to the decathlete Rafer Johnson, who worked out with him often in Rome as they prepared for their separate events. “Glenn Davis turned out to be one of my best friends” on the team, Johnson said later. “He was tough as nails. One of the toughest athletes I’d ever been around. I worked out with him, and he was a load to keep up with. He would run these repeat two-twenties or three-thirties or quarter miles, again and again. He would run you into the ground.” The friendship of the white runner from Ohio State and the black decathlete from UCLA extended beyond the track. “We had a lot of common interests. I really got to know him,” Davis recalled. “We ran around together and talked about poetry. I liked to read poetry, and he wrote his own.” The connection is what counted, Johnson said later, not the poetry, which was forgettable. “We made it up. We made this stuff up. I never wrote anything down. It was about where we were and what we were doing and who said what. We had rap before rap was here.”

  Like Johnson, and also much like Dave Sime, Glenn Davis’s future in track seemed uncertain a year before Rome. Slowed by the recurrence of an old football injury, his conditioning suffered, and so did his nerves. There was a brief period when every hurdle seemed insurmountable. But like Johnson and Sime, he persevered. His speed returned just in time for the Olympics, along with his supreme confidence. He was the world’s leading student of his event, breaking it into segments and knowing the maximum speed of his opponents for each segment and precisely how fast he had to run to win. No one could beat him, he said—and no one did.

  In the 400 hurdles, a runner must push himself at sprinter speed for about as long as the human body can endure, all the while clearing ten intermediate hurdles three feet high and spaced 35 meters apart. It requires a unique combination of speed, stamina, and timing. At the final in Rome, Davis cleared the first hurdle smoothly, but he bumped the second and fell off-stride, disturbing his timing all the way through the sixth hurdle. He was near the rear of the six runners then—“running scared,” he would later say—but regained form over the seventh hurdle, closed the gap, and burst into the lead in the final straightaway before throwing himself across the finish line and spilling onto the track. Not only did Davis win another gold with a time of 49.3 seconds, but he led an American sweep, with teammates Cliff Cushman and Dick Howard winning silver and bronze.

  At the awards ceremony, the medals were placed around the necks of the three Yanks by a distinguished British gentleman of late middle age who walked with a stoop as he approached the podium. It was Lord David Burghley, the sixth Marquess of Exeter, vice president of the IOC, and winner of this very event at the 1928 Olympics in Amsterdam. Red Smith watched from the press section as “the self-possessed Davis, Olympic and world champion, bent low to let England’s old Olympian hang the gold medal around his neck, waved to the crowd, grabbed Lord David’s elbow with a companionable clutch, and shook hands. Cushman grinned like a blond billiken getting his silver bauble. Hands folded in prayer, Howard bowed his neck as tho
ugh for the guillotine.”

  Many members of the press held a fondness for the marquess, extolling his athletic grit, sense of humor, and belief in fair play. They recalled the time he finished second in a U.S. race but adamantly refused first prize when the winner was disqualified on a technicality, saying that he would have none of it and that he was beaten by a better hurdler. When asked once why someone of his refinement would concentrate on such a demanding event as the 400 hurdles, his Lordship smiled and said, “I won the bloody race at the Penn Relays one year, and from then on I was stuck with it.” In his upper-class way, he was a full-effort man—without his work, the Olympics would not have been in war-ravaged London in 1948—who carried himself with a classic air of self-importance softened by self-deprecation. In a letter to a friend in the IOC revealing his elevation to marquess in 1956, he had written: “My father has unfortunately died during the past few days, and as a result I now become the Marquess of Exeter. I shudder to think of the effect of this in the sphere of international sport. I can see a long vista of suspicious enquiries as to who the devil this chap ‘Exeter’ is, and when they hear the answer I am quite certain they won’t believe it. However, rather like a pet dog who answers to ‘You b——!’ I shall also answer to either Burghley or Exeter!”

  It seemed fitting that the old Olympian, answering the call in Rome, had been bathed in warm applause as he approached the podium to bemedal the American hurdlers. Good feeling all around, except for one observer who took in the scene with some measure of consternation: the conspiracy-minded Frenchy Grombach.

  When not extolling the virtues of his favorite sports, fencing, the modern pentathlon, and boxing, Grombach had been using his column in the Rome Daily American—a two-week sinecure secured for him by friends in the CIA—to attack Lord Burghley for his role in forcing Taiwan to compete as Taiwan or Formosa rather than the Republic of China. The former State Department spy had become obsessed with Burghley, convinced that the old Tory was in league with the Red Chinese. An inveterate spook in a city now crawling with them, he spent his Roman evenings trawling hotel bars and cocktail hours trying to haul in fresh gossip on the marquess. It was Grombach’s nature to insert himself into any situation where he saw red. Earlier in 1960, he had been on the case of Yves Montand and Simone Signoret, the French acting couple with leftist political beliefs who had applied for admission into the U.S. so that Signoret could pick up her Academy Award for best actress in the film Room at the Top. In a letter to the U.S. embassy in Paris, Grombach had warned: “Some individuals may mistakenly believe that leniency toward people like Montand will improve our relationship with France and win friends for the USA, but any weakening of this nature will be more harmful than advantageous.”

  Grombach wanted no weakening with the Marquess of Exeter, either, though he seemed darkly pleased to note that the slouched figure down there awarding the medals was “badly crippled with arthritis and needs a cane to get around.”

  As Lord Burghley hobbled away, the long-jump final was nearing an end at the far side of the stadium. The preliminaries had started early that morning, with the stands barely a third full, and by late afternoon the unwieldy forty-nine-man field had been culled down to the final efforts of Ralph Boston and Bo Roberson of the U.S., Manfred Steinbach of Germany, and Igor Ter-Ovanesyan of the Soviet Union. In the now-crowded stadium sat Jesse Owens, looking cool in a yellow short-sleeve polo shirt and racing cap, and besieged by autograph hounds, who had also surrounded crooner Bing Crosby, seated nearby. Even as he signed his name, Owens kept his eyes focused on the jumpers. Of all the Olympic track-and-field records, his broad-jump mark set at the 1936 Berlin Games had endured the longest. As he approached his forty-seventh birthday in Rome, Owens said he felt “like a father who has come back to watch his successful children.”

  In the family of athletes, Ralph Boston was like the big brother of Wilma Rudolph and her teammates, the lone male Olympian from Tennessee State. He played cards with the Tigerbelles, teased them, worked out with them, and rooted for them. Coming out of the rural South, reared in the lumber mill town of Laurel in southeast Mississippi as the youngest of ten siblings, Boston taught himself long-jump techniques by studying films of the 1956 Olympic champ, mimicking the way Greg Bell kicked into the air and jackknifed his legs before bringing them close together at the finish. His first desire was to be a decathlete like Rafer Johnson, but at 164 pounds he lacked the upper-body strength for the weight events. Going into 1960, his aim was simply to make the U.S. Olympic team in the long jump, but now he was the favorite. With a stunning leap of 26 feet 11 inches at a warm-up meet in California earlier that summer, he had already broken Owens’s world record, and now he was expected to set the Olympic record as well. But going into his last jump, Boston was not even certain of winning a medal. Overcome by nerves, he had to find an official to escort him back to the bathroom under the stands.

  Returning to the infield, he took his position at the end of the runway, 100 feet from the takeoff point. He had already fixed his spots precisely with the steel tape measure. One deep breath, relax, four loping strides—free and loose to unlimber his body—and then he was at full speed, trying to clear his head of all but a few key thoughts. First the starting mark. He had to spring into the air as close as possible behind it, but not go over into the narrow putty forestrip and get disqualified. Speeding down the runway for this final jump in Rome, he felt something slightly amiss and had to adjust his stride just before takeoff. Once airborne, he tried to concentrate on bringing his feet back within 10 or 12 inches of each other for the landing. Not perfect—he knew he could do better—but when officials marked his distance at 26 feet 73/4 inches, Boston had seized the Olympic record. Even then, a medal was not assured, with three rivals still to go.

  Next came Ter-Ovanesyan the jazz-loving, Voice of America–listening newfound friend of Dave Sime, who had grown up in Kiev worshiping Jesse Owens. When Igor was an eighteen-year-old at Melbourne and again in the dual meet with the U.S. in Moscow in 1958, he had inwardly feared the American athletes and did not believe he could beat them. In Rome he was still not sure that he was better than Boston and Roberson, but he no longer viewed them as invincible. One day shortly after arriving in the village, he had visited the U.S. compound and happened to be weighing himself on a scale in the landing just as Boston was coming down the stairs. “Hello, Ralph, I’m Igor,” he said. Boston’s reaction was: Who is this guy? He vaguely knew the name, not the face, but thought Ter-Ovanesyan must be nice if he knew English. Igor sensed the beginning of a rivalry. He thought they acted “like two dogs walking around sniffing each other.”

  In his dreams, Ter-Ovanesyan sometimes found himself flying. It was such a pleasant feeling, he thought, floating lightly above the ground. He tried to re-create that feeling in the long jump, but knew that if he put together all the jumps of his life, his total time in the air would be only a minute or two. Broad jumping was not so much pleasant as strenuous. He thought it was “like you are stuffed in a cannon and pushed and fly forward with a lot of force. The sense of flying comes only in dreams. It is just a slow gliding in dreams, but in reality it is a tough push kind of feeling.”

  His father, Aram Aveticiovich Ter-Ovanesyan, a professor of sports theory in Kiev, had made it to Rome for the Games and was there to watch as Igor flew down the runway and into the air on his final jump, landing at 26 feet 41/2 inches. It was just short of Boston, but moved him ahead of the others. Manfred Steinbach, a sprinter and long jumper who had fled from East Germany to West Germany only a year earlier, went next and also surpassed 26 feet, but he was marked a few inches short of Ter-Ovanesyan.

  All that remained was the final jump of Bo Roberson. The all-sports star from Cornell was “dead tired.” He had not been able to practice much since hurting a leg earlier in the summer, but this was his last chance, and the other jumpers knew that he was a fearless competitor. “Continental sports crowds have a way of sensing moments of drama en masse, and no
w the thousands in the seats by the long jump hushed each other into stillness,” British journalist Neil Allen wrote in his diary. “The muscular Roberson stood at the beginning of the runway, looking at the cinder path he would have to travel. His dark face was impassive, but I wondered at that moment if he thought with a sudden disquiet of the serious hamstring injury which caused his left leg to be bandaged. Suddenly he crouched and then sprinted for the board that would relieve him of this unbearable tension. He hit it sweetly, rose high, and then landed in a shower of sand.”

  Boston stood nearby. Had gold been snatched from him at the last minute? “My heart was really pounding as they measured that last jump of Roberson’s,” he said later. The electronic scoreboard put up the distance: 26-71/4. Boston had won by a half inch. Silver for Roberson, bronze for Ter-Ovanesyan. In the stands, Jesse Owens felt only a twinge of disappointment about losing his record, then consoled himself by saying that these were his boys, Boston and Roberson, and they carried on his tradition. Ter-Ovanesyan felt badly only for a moment, too, then was overwhelmed by a new sense of confidence. He had jumped within inches of the Americans, and someday soon, he felt, he would fly past them. Down in Laurel, Mississippi, Boston’s mother broke into tears when told by a local reporter that her son had won gold in Rome. She was so excited that she had to sit down and drink a glass of milk. “I didn’t have any idea that my baby’s jumping around would ever amount to anything,” Eulalia Boston said.